… I don’t see the harm in adding more fictions to the hypotheticals. Given that the opposition’s evidence is the “millions” of home-invasions that’ve been thwarted yearly, or most probably even hourly, by gun-savvy Common People Who Love The Constitution More Than Dirty Liberals Do, I don’t see why Dirty Liberals oughta restrict themselves to reality. And so:

SEK, while I recognize that Batman is the most well-known Superhero with a strong dislike of guns in cannon, I’d argue that Spider-Man is better liberal superhero that doesn’t use guns. Batman is a very dark, superhero with a pessimistic and ultimately nihilistic outlook on life. The exception being the Adam West interpretation.

Spider-Man is ususally more upbeat and positive and optimism has long been a feature of most prominent liberals in the United States. FDR, LBJ, Humphrey, Martin Luther King and others were not known for their dark pessimism. Spider-Man also has a stronger sense of community in both his civillian and super-hero life. Peter Parker works for living rather being a play boy and takes interest in the body politic. While both Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne both started on their super-hero career because of a desire for vengence, Peter Parker has developed more in his motivation and is currently a hero for the well-being of others. Batman is still primarily motivated by vengence. The evidence is pretty conclusive that Spider-Man is a much more appropriate superhero for liberals.

Though… I mean, I recognize that gun violence shattered both Bruce Wayne’s and Peter Parker’s lives, leading to consuming obsessions on both parts, but I don’t think anywhere in the Spider-Man mythos is the gun as fetishized as it has been since at least Miller in the Batman literature. Parker centers on his guilt at not stopping the bad guy (stopping without a gun, by the way); Wayne can never not see the gun that killed his parents and broke his mother’s string of pearls.

It would suprise me if anybody on this blog didn’t qualify as a nerd in some way. Maybe Erik, at least in terms of his cultural tastes, is the least nerdy person on this blog.

I kind of thing of myself as an ex-nerd more than anything else. I used to really like science fiction, fantasy, comics, and video games but not so much anymore. My tastes have grown more towards literary fiction and away from genre. Currently, I’m trying to read the Yiddish canon, at least whats available in English translation. I still have fondness for some of my former tastes though.

I’m not sure if makes me more or less nerdy to say that I’ve read much of the Yiddish canon in Yiddish. (But only because I was bored, and that’s all my grandmother had in her house. I’d have been reading comics if they’d been there.)

So yes, I think it’s safe to say we’re all nerds here. I’m just delighted that, on occasion, I can pretend I’m not the biggest one. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to re-watch the Doctor Who Christmas special …

I hate to nitpick, but Batman had that weird light-gun (that the cop shot at, so some strange symbolism there) and he’s happy with machine guns/rockets on his vehicles. Batman’s hardly consistent on the no-guns policy. Especially since this is what Batman used to look like.

Although…one could argue that Batman taking down Azazael after Jean-Paul had added what were effectively belt-fed machine guns to the Batman costume could be seen as an anti-gun message.

Not to out-nerd you, but that Batman image is from Planetary, and it’s a version of Batman from before he had dead parents. (Which he only acquired after five or six years.) Moreover, I think that image is stolen from my site, since I clipped that panel specifically for that post. But whatever, you’re right about the early material, and about the big guns on his vehicles, but he only uses them to blow shit up, not kill people. That’s actually a not-very-fine line, when you think about it: sometimes you need to bust through a wall, but that doesn’t mean you want to kill the people behind it.

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